Surprised this is upvoted on top and many comments agreeing. Every time on HN I said Linux Desktop ( KDE or GNOME ) still has that linux looks and unpolished, I get told off and even at one point being told I have no taste and most users wont notice it.
Design may not be all about how it looks, but consumers are absolutely attracted to aesthetics and visual appeals.
On another note, the Chinese are doing surprising well on Linux Desktop front. Although I guess that is mostly funded by Chinese Tech Giants.
Honestly, I'm surprised you get told off a lot. My own subjective experience is the polar opposite :-)
As a Linux desktop dev, getting hung out to dry over this in HN threads is my usual experience, and it's pretty frustrating and dispiriting. People tend to take the free output of FOSS communities for granted a lot and have zero inhibitions at heaving ridicule or even more mean-spirited things at your work output - especially at HN as a "how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy.
I'm still surprised at how prevalent this is in the HN setting however. FOSS is generally not popular on HN, but a lot of HN posters also style themselves as founders, leaders, business developers, side project-ers. Yet despite this outlook the debate very rarely takes a can-do constructive perspective a la "How do we make large FOSS communities better at this area of SW eng?" or "How can we develop this capability in this paradigm", etc. as you would maybe except.
Instead the discourse rarely rises above the level of just asssuming devs are dumb or lack essential capabilities, which is bold about a generally fairly smart and intrinsically motivated demographic.
There’s definitely no shortage of armchair critics, but particularly when it comes to design, some amount of the criticism comes from having tried to engage with open projects to help improve them only to be snubbed, downplayed, ignored, etc. Of course this is a complex issue since these kinds of interactions vary wildly between projects and individuals in those projects, but you can see how that might bring frustration.
Incidentally I think this has also been what’s inspired many of the numerous forks and new projects within the Linux desktop space: people who initially intended to contribute to existing projects find themselves unable to effect substantial or sufficient change, become frustrated, and go start their own thing.
This is definitely a thing, but I hope KDE specifically on average has a rep of being easy to get into and owning our mistakes. At least this is really the culture we try to cultivate broadly.
For example, we also have some devs who proactively read or watch negative reviews and extract the good points into tickets (it's a nice low cost source of one form of user testing), and we've over the last half-decade or so built a strong culture of paying attention to user pain points, change defaults to match expectations, etc.
I know this thread reads pretty negatively, but I can say confidently our userbase has never been happier and the total number of users we serve well has grown significantly. You can even see it in the metrics - our monetary user donations have tripled in the last couple of years.
Because the HN I read, ""how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy" was only between 2008 to ~2012. Most of the time how to make money wasn't even a thing from 2014 onwards. Broadly speaking It wasn't until recent two to three years did it came back. As a matter of fact most of HN at some point hated companies that makes profits and not giving back. HN's pendulum swings back and forth.
I generally dont think critics are about dev or FOSS at all. But this reminded me I need to be careful with critics as it could be dispiriting. At least my view it is just lack of recourses or funding, the hardest part in FOSS. But any discussion on the topic will obviously turned into Google funding Mozilla type of argument. Which then turns into philosophy and political battle.
Gnome may not be perfect but it’s sooo much better than kde. kde is just awful, it’s an eternal mockup, as if they let the code writers also design the interface. They have no idea what they are doing. And they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
I'm not a huge fan of KDE, but I prefer it strongly over Gnome. Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better.
> they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
What is a "good" or "bad" interface has a huge amount subjectivity to it. Just because you dislike a certain UI doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's bad for you.
Design may not be all about how it looks, but consumers are absolutely attracted to aesthetics and visual appeals.
On another note, the Chinese are doing surprising well on Linux Desktop front. Although I guess that is mostly funded by Chinese Tech Giants.